Changing lives: Impact of Peace Corps experience in '60s continues

Originally published in the Columbia Missourian on May 23, 2022.

Greg Rusk remembers sitting on the steps outside as the evening air began to cool. He could see the rice paddies starting to turn green as the shoots began to sprout.

He can still hear the tinkling of bicycles on Jessore Road and the sound of children laughing. Smells of food cooking can still bring a wave of nostalgia.

“That stuck with me,” he said, “and I think that changed my life.”

Rusk was in West Bengal as part of India Mission 37, a Peace Corps group sent to help farmers become more self-sufficient. Corps volunteers traveled in pairs, with each group being assigned a different village.

Rusk was stationed next to the border of what is Bangladesh today, about 35 miles north of Calcutta, India. There, he helped introduce a new variety of rice to the farmers.

He also helped a journalist for the Calcutta Statesman put on a play to raise money for the Indira Gandhi’s Relief Fund, trying to bring aid to areas affected by drought. It was a black-tie-and-sari event where he was the only non-Bengali member of the cast.

Fifty-six years later, Rusk is sitting with old friends from the troupe fondly sharing memories and the reality of joining the organization in the ‘60s. The group recently put together an endowment for the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources in hopes of encouraging young people to help others.

“We’re not gonna be around here forever, but we’re hoping that the memory of what we did will continue,” said Don Gray, a previous India 37 volunteer.

Creating an endowment

The $25,000 endowment is to, “support students doing work for the continued development of India,” said Kerry Clark, director of International Programs at the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.

Today, students in the program work in multidisciplinary groups to solve issues of poverty and food insecurity. Currently there are 25 students who get into groups and decide on a project.

“One was interested in working on midday feeding programs at elementary schools in India,” she said.

Another student was interested in improving sanitation, and another focused on gardening among communities.

The program isn’t for any students to go to India themselves. “They would work with an existing organization in India and provide some added value, where maybe some of the ideas they come up with could help improve ongoing projects,” Clark said.

With the sanitation project, the group talked about developing a children’s book about hygiene and sanitation to distribute in elementary schools in India. Some of the money from the endowment could be used to publish the book.

Previously there wasn’t a program that funded international students to contribute to developing economies, food security and poverty reduction. This endowment will allow both domestic and international students to participate in economic and social developments in India.

“We embrace groups like India 37 who recognize that they had a defining moment of their lives and they want other people to experience the same thing. This is a really good endowment that will give students the ability to do something that’s beyond their own little world and thinking about others,” Clark said. “These kind of endowments are really important, in that they don’t just help the student, but they help the people that the student helps too.”

Peace Corps training

It used to start with getting a telegram of acceptance from Western Union. All volunteers from India 37 came to MU and spent three months in training before being shipped off. The program was led by the College of Agriculture with the goal to figure out how to make certain that there is enough food for everyone in places where there are disease, climate change and distribution issues.

Of the 100 volunteers who were selected, one-third were deselected during training. Only 44 were in India the whole two years. Part of preparation included 300 hours of language learning.

World War II had ended only 20 years before, so volunteers slept in old wooden Army barracks on campus. Each wooden room had at least four people staying inside, where they slept on bunk beds.

At the time there was an experiment being done by John Hopkins University to see if there was a drug that could help a human survive rabies. Volunteer Frank Fountain and some others decided to take part in it before the trip. He recalls the needle being huge.

“Every three months or so you got an injection,” Fountain said. “I could never look at it.”

An ‘imperfect world’

Ed Keesling rode almost all the way from California to Columbia on his motorcycle. Today he has his own pottery and tile making studio.

At the time he joined the Peace Corps he was an English major. He, like many volunteers, had no previous experience with farming.

Once he got to his village in India, he learned that a lot of the farmers were really receptive to new ideas, but some didn’t want to change. A lot of volunteers ended up taking up side projects while they were there. Keesling got involved with the All India Poultry Association and began talking to farmers about chicken coops. The goal was to market eggs in Calcutta to try and develop a wholesale market.

“By the end (when) we were ready to go home, we’d gotten to the point where there were so many people who had excess eggs to sell,” he said.

Keesling’s work allowed him to develop a lot of self-confidence, and the ability to adapt to situations and come up with creative solutions.

“Usually in the morning we’d meet with some people from the agriculture department at a local tea stall and talk about where we were gonna go,” he said. “We’d go out on our bicycles and meet some farmers.”

Before joining India 37, Charlie McCaffrey was in a Catholic seminary studying to become a priest. For him, meeting the people and observing the culture was a special experience. The society and social norms he grew up in were confining at times, especially being in his early 20s.

“I began to think about what is really important to me, not just to my social environment and my society.”

Upon returning, he decided he needed to rethink what he wanted to do in life and got a degree in urban planning, working most of the time in New York. He is now retired and living in Cape Cod.

Gray opens up an alumni magazine from 1967. He didn’t see it when it was published because they left for India the previous December. It was rediscovered on the internet.

“If you look at what all of us have done post Peace Corps, there’s a strong sense of giving to the community, and that was in part reinforced and learned in the Peace Corps experience,” he said.

Fountain recently retired and was one of those leading efforts in the recent reunion.

“We live in an imperfect world and an imperfect society, and we can spend our lifetime trying to make it more perfect,” he said. “We’ll never quite succeed. But it’s great to try, and it’s fun to try.”